Today in APIs: Affectiva's API Helps Gauge Emotional Reactions

Affectiva launches API to read emotional reactions to advertising. Particle Clicker game wins CERN hackathon, aims to turn people on to physics. Plus: Uber gets ready to launch an API, and SmartBear partners with Apiary to deliver plug-in.

Affectiva Brings Emotional Intelligence to Advertising with New API

Affectiva, creator of the Affdex Score that measures emotional responses to content on screen, has created an API for its market research, publisher and advertiser clients. The data offered up by the API includes real-time analytics, media testing norms, and statistical measurements as well as the Affdex Score.

With many clients having established their own analytic platforms, integrating our emotion-intelligence layer into their solution was a necessity. Now they can quickly and easily obtain our raw emotion insights and analyze the results as gathered.

This focus on tabulating emotional response may be an important part of the solution to an age old problem in advertising: how do you know what's working?

CERN Hackathon Winners Create Physics Game

With the Kim Kardashian Hollywood game reaching ever new heights in popularity, its tempting to wonder if the whole genre is't a colossal time and money waster. But a group of students at the recent CERN hackathon created a game that makes physics into a career rivaling that of being a celebrity. Warning: it's addictive, no physics background required. As Kathryn Jepsen reports in the particle physics magazine Symmetry, the students who created it, Igor Babuschkin, Kevin Dungs, Gabor Biro, Tadej Novak and Jiannan Zhang knew it would be addictive early on:

In the beginning, the player must click on an image that looks suspiciously like the CMS detector at the Large Hadron Collider. Each click creates a particle collision, which produces data. Produce enough data, and you can conduct research, which earns you reputation points, which wins you grant money, which allows you to hire other people to do the clicking for you. For the rest of the game, data and money accumulate on their own at faster and faster rates the more research you do, the more upgrades you purchase and the more staff you hire. Eventually you’re running a lab with PhD students, postdocs, research fellows, tenured professors, Nobel Prize winners and—most productive of all, according to the game—summer students. The research options follow a rough history of discoveries in particle physics.

The game is modeled after another addictive game, Cookie Clicker. The code is open source, available on Github.